short powerpoint on African American women and white women and slavery in the United States

1. Women and Slavery
Gender differences, Gender conflicts
And Southern Patriarchy

2. Remember from past classes
• Early racial, gender division:
– Tax on black women who work in fields (no similar
tax on white women field hands)—1643
– “The condition of the mother” (hereditary slavery,
VA. 1662)
“Women were neither better nor worse off than
men under slavery, but enslaved men’s and
women’s experiences were different” (think about
this)

3. Changes in Slavery post-U.S. War for
Independence
• Slave population beginning to increase naturally as sex ratios
even out
• Increasing limitations and prohibitions on slavery (North)
• slave-owners heading toward the idea of
encouraging natural increase, encouraging marriage,
forced marriages, breeding
Appears that slavery is coming to a close, but
technology and open land breathe new life into the
institution: Cotton Gin, Indian Removal and the Deep
South (Miss., Al., La.,).

4. Early 19th Century
• Natural increase becomes a necessity in 1808
when the international slave trade is banned
• Importance of fertility, better care for
pregnant mothers
King Cotton—requires more land,
more labor, more slaves

5. Jezebel and Mammy: Two Slave
Woman (stereotypes)
• The Jezebel: naturally promiscuous (dates
back to early Euro travelers to Africa)
• Europeans mistook semi-nudity for lewdness
(stereotype formed and nurtured from Euro
contact on)
• Big Diff. between white women (men’s ideals):
• Slave women were not submissive,
subordinate or prudish and not expected to be
so.

6. The Uniqueness of African American
Women
• Stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-
developed ideologies in America, that regarding
women and that regarding the “Negro”
• Fundamental image of black women: strength,
ability to tolerate high level of misery and heavy,
distasteful work
• Less of a women in terms of “femininity” but
more of a woman in that she is allegedly the
embodiment of Mother Earth—a superwoman

7. Common elements in oppression?
• Common elements in myths of blacks and
women: both characterized as infantile,
irresponsible, submissive, promiscuous
• Both historically dependent politically and
economically on white men
• Both consigned to subservient roles
• Both have shared a relationship of
powerlessness v. white men
• Both treated as outsiders, inferiors

8. Antebellum America
• In antebellum America, the female slave’s
chattel status, sex, and race combine to create
complicated set of myths of black
womanhood
• The Jezebel:
– Person governed almost entirely by her libido
– Counter image of mid-Nineteenth Century ideal of
the Victorian Lady (similar to the True Woman of
the Cult of True Womanhood)

9. The Jezebel Stereotype/Can’t Win for
Losing
• Reproduction
• Through the use of numerous incentives, slave
holders made sure that slave women were
prolific
• The natural increase in the slave population
demonstrated to slaveholders that female
slaves were indeed lustful.
• Causal correlations always drawn between
sensuality and fertility

10. Slave women’s sexual activities
• Became a topic of public conversation
• Work conditions were also conducive to
promulgate Jezebel myth
• White women: layers of clothing. Not so with
black slave women
• Auction block: Slave buyers touch, poke, feel
women’s (nude) bodies. Attempt to gauge
fertility. Also equated to promiscuity

11. Rape and Miscegenation
• For women, often a choice between
miscegenation and the worst experiences
slavery had to offer
• Many expected and often got something in
return for sex
• This also tended to boost the Jezebel image
Southern white women acutely aware of what
is going on (often take it out on slave women)

12. White male-black female relationships
• Most based on exploitative power relations,
but . . .
• Conventional wisdom that “naturally
promiscuous slaves desired the relationships
• In defense of South, argued that white men
never had to resort to violence with slave
women

13. Three-Sided Relationships
• Slave owner, white mistress, black slave
• Half white children told the story
• Both women helpless: Slave’s child owned by
slave owner. White mistress unable to defy
social/legal constraints that kept her bound to
her husband.

14. Jezebel v. Mammy
• Obsessed with the flesh/asexual;
carnal/maternal; slut/deeply religious
• Mammy was the superwoman: she could do
anything, and do it better than anyone else;
expertise in everything domestic
• She was the premier house servant and all
others were her subordinates
• Completely dedicated to the white family;
especially the children

15. House Servants
• On the whole, can be seen as better treated
than field workers; food, dress, medical care
• Other hand, on call 24 hours, less private time
than field workers, subject to mood swings of
white family
• White mistresses held the keys to the
household—wives “as much slaves as their
Negroes”

16. Field Workers and Child Bearing
• Besides doing field work, expected to have
children and increase the slave population
• 19th Century: motherhood increasingly most
important role (to mother, of course, but also
to slaveholder—depending on his needs)
• Children (profits) are brought to the fields
• Childbearing circumscribed women’s lives in
terms of their ability to resist the system

17. Slave Mothers
• Less likely to be sold (than men, in their prime
years)
• Failure to have children could mean trouble.
Could be repeatedly sold (but women did.
Supposedly “barren” slaves gave birth after Civil
War)
• Could be “rewarded” with less work for having an
extraordinary amount of children.
• Compelled to be resilient, resourceful, and
rebellious enough to protect family

18. Slave Families
• Husbands never provided sole or most significant
means of support for their wives and children
• Had no legal claim to their families; could not
legitimately offer them protection from abuses
• Slave wife/mother: never able to give the needs
of her husband and children greatest priority
• Most slave children grew up with their mothers
but not their fathers present on a daily basis.
• Prevalence of female communities.

19. Resistance
• Running away less likely (children) most
runaways between 16-35. Women this age
either pregnant, nursing an infant, or with at
least one small child
• During these years slave women received their
(relative) best care: pregnant women may not
work full days, weeks off after birth
• However, high rates of truancy (running and
coming back)

20. Resistance Related to Work
• Motherhood structure women’s experience,
but so did division of labor
• Men more likely to be given jobs that take
them off plantations
• Women less likely to be hired out

21. How did women resist (both sexual
exploitation and slavery system)?
• Disobey orders, steal, protest (to get a
different job, for ex.)
• Feigning ignorance, dissembling
• Murder, arson, fighting back, refusing to be
whipped
• Poison
• Feign illness (leverage as mothers)
• Abortions, infanticide(?? Suspicions)

22. Gender Convention, Ideals, and
Identity (Stevenson)
• Slave female principle: protection and
procreation of black life in the face of white
opposition
• Slave women did not lose their female
principle or moral purpose under slavery
• Black women were indeed raped, “despite the
belief commonly held by southern whites that
black women could not be raped, since they
were naturally promiscuous